Improving Inventory Demand Forecasting by Using the Sales Pipeline: A Case Study

The inventory demand forecasting is a critical function in a manufacturing organization as it impacts the major financial metrics like inventory valuation, gross margin and net margin. The currently used demand planning processes often fail to incorporate input from the Sales pipeline. Failure to do so provides challenges of how to increase the lead times for the supply chain process. This can be accomplished by introducing input criteria from the Sales pipeline. This case study is an attempt to provide such mechanism.